Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War -- SoulstormReview

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Are two more armies too much?

By Charles Onyett

Back in 2004 Relic unleashed the original Dawn of War, a real-time strategy game, and established its distinctive, polished take on control point capture gameplay. The game shifted focus from base building to managing units in the field and provided an enjoyable method of resource collection. It didn't hurt that it was based in a universe as rich as Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 fiction, where blood, beastly deeds, and brutal combat are commonplace.

Since then we've seen two expansions, Winter Assault and the superb Dark Crusade. While Dark Crusade changed quite a bit about the single-player campaign, the third expansion, Soulstorm, doesn't offer much that's surprising. Naturally there's more content like two new armies, a retooled persistent campaign, flying units, and more maps, but there isn't much that drastically alters how players experience the game. That being said, it still features fantastically addictive RTS gameplay, even if the formula seems a little tired at this point, particularly after Relic advanced their capture point mechanic with Company of Heroes in 2006.

The new factions include the Sisters of Battle, a predominantly female band of holy crusaders, and the Dark Eldar, a twisted version of the Eldar. Though they manage to retain their own distinct personalities and unique elements of play, things are really starting to blend together with a total of nine armies in the game.

The Dark Eldar's soulstorm spell.

Despite the overcrowded selection, the two additions are nevertheless entertaining. The Sisters' strength seems to be with their infantry groups, augmented by the ability to attach certain units for added firepower, abilities, or healing. Several of their unit groupings can be customized with weaponry to bust up other infantry, puncture vehicles, and more rapidly destroy buildings, making them effective throughout the course of a game. Limiting some of their unit abilities is a new resource called faith, generated by upgrading capture point structures with special additions. Building and maintaining faith doesn't result in any kind of dramatically different play style, however.

With the Dark Eldar you get a different kind of resource to worry about: soul essence. Several units possess a harvest ability, which when activated consumes the essence contained in the corpses of enemies. Reaping soul essence on the battlefield is somewhat pointless, however, as you can have your unit cap management structures back in your base constantly spawn bodies. By assigning a builder unit or two to harvest, a constant stream of the stuff is ensured, so there's little strategy to the whole mechanic, making it feel more like busywork. With enough essence, Dark Eldar players can unleash spells on foes ranging from a few area-of-effect damage strikes to morale modifiers.

The rest of the armies have received minor tweaks, the most notable being flying units. After toying around with them, the units don't feel like they've been integrated very well. Though they can hover across terrain, they don't seem to do much to alter how you'd play had they not been included.

In hot pursuit.

Fans of Dark Crusade's persistent campaign will almost certainly enjoy the single-player here, which is basically the same thing. Instead of a single continent the territory for Soulstorm is broken up across several planets, though the number of contestable provinces isn't all that much more. The Sisters of Battle get the added ability to establish forward bases with their command point spoils and the Dark Eldar aren't restricted by the paths to hop between planets like other armies are. As in Dark Crusade, you gain access to special gear and powered-up units that accompany heroes into each battle and can reinforce territory using requisition points gained from expanding across the map.

Tying together the campaign is a flimsy exposition describing why all the races are converging on this section of the galaxy. To say it's compelling is to lie. More narrative is delivered as you assault stronghold provinces and have to deal with several special objectives to wipe enemies off the map for good, but you'll find more character and personality in each race's unit acknowledgements than in the cut-scenes. Soulstorm is almost entirely about the combat.

And the combat is enjoyable, helped along by the audio and visual elements that effectively convey the carnage and blind aggression Warhammer 40K is known for. Units and vehicles closely resemble their table top equivalents and their personalities come across clearly through animations and often hilarious unit speech. The Dark Eldar builder unit's terrified responses to construction and movement commands were a personal favorite.

The Verdict

Soulstorm's development was handled mostly by Iron Lore (the recently-closed developer best known for Titan Quest) and they've produced a solid expansion. The main issue here is just that everything feels so familiar. While the game still plays quite well and Warhammer 40K fans will surely appreciate all the unit designs for the Sisters of Battle and Dark Eldar, too little has been done to enliven the experience, particularly when compared to what Dawn of War's previous expansion, Dark Crusade, did for the game.